Various embodiments of this disclosure relate to system performance measurement tools and, more particularly, to hardware sizing.
Information technology professionals use common metrics, or sizers, for describing the relative capacities and performance capabilities of machines. These metrics are meant to indicate what workloads machines can handle and which machines are needed to handle expected workloads. The common metrics, however, do not represent good practice.
In general, the objective of a sizer is to determine how many of a particular base machine are needed to equal a machine being sized. By using a common base machine, various sized machines can be compared against one another. Unfortunately, conventional sizers consider the throughput rate at a steady state as the metric of interest. Throughput rate cannot be maximized without giving up utilization, response time, or the number of loads held, e.g., users, applications, virtual machines, and JVMs.
These conventional sizing methods are valid if and only if the metric of choice is a ratio of maximum throughput rates under steady state conditions. In modern virtualized environments, such metrics are insufficient to determine the relative capacities of machines unless the throughput rate is the metric of choice and not simply a convenient way to get a measured ratio.